To so confidently believe oneself to be on the right side of history is risky—for a writer especially. In that balmy glow of self-regard, complacency can easily take root. And good prose demands a measure of self-doubt—the worry that nags at a writer, that forces her to double back on her sentences, unravel and knit them up again, asking repeatedly: Is this clear? Is this true? Is this enticing? This book has a slackness to it that suggests Roy has abdicated some of these anxieties.

There is a tradition in queer women’s writing in which creative work, politics, and desire are comfortably intertwined. Consider Adrienne Rich, Minnie Bruce Pratt, and Audre Lorde, who wrote, in an essay on the political potential of the erotic: “There is, for me, no difference between writing a good poem and moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love.” But Arbus was not looking for love. “Once she became an adventurer she went places no one else had ever gone to,” Arbus’s lover Marvin Israel said. “Those places were scary.” She wanted to cross all kinds of thresholds, emotional as well as physical. Some lovers chafed at what she wanted them to do to her—one told Patricia Bosworth, almost apologetically, that he just didn’t want to punch Arbus in the mouth. But there was nothing it seemed she wouldn’t do or couldn’t look at. For years a rumor circulated that she’d set up a camera to record her suicide, to shoot her as she lay, “crunched up” in her bathtub, in the medical examiner’s words, wrists sliced to the tendons. Fear was part of what Arbus was seeking, even if she didn’t understand entirely why. In therapy she discussed her habit of picking up odd-looking men on the street. For “experience,” her psychiatrist recalled, years later. “That’s all she could name it.”

This spiny, scary story of moral decline, crisply plotted and no thicker than my thumb, has been heralded as the finest Indian novel in a decade, notable for a book in bhasha, one of India’s vernacular languages. The Great Indian Novel has almost always referred to a particular kind of book: big, baggy, polyphonic and, crucially, written in English — “Midnight’s Children,” say, or “The God of Small Things.” Admirers of this austere little tale, who include Suketu Mehta and Katherine Boo, have compared Shanbhag to Chekhov. Folded into the compressed, densely psychological portrait of this family is a whole universe: a parable of rising India, an indictment of domestic violence, a taxonomy of ants and a sly commentary on translation itself.

A strange thing about novels is how often, and strenuously, they proclaim the dangers of novel-reading. Consider the fates of our most famous bibliomaniacs. Don Quixote succumbs to delusions, debt and sundry humiliations. Emma Bovary to debt, seedy affairs and protracted death by arsenic. Catherine Morland, delusions. Mary Bennet, insufferable pedantry. Jo March — unforgivably — marriage to an insufferable pedant and surrender of all creative ambitions.

The novel’s ability to seduce readers with its alternate, and invariably more attractive, versions of reality was much lamented in the 19th century. Thomas Jefferson blamed literature for encouraging “a bloated imagination, sickly judgment and disgust towards all the real businesses of life.” But it is this very power — to inspire us to insist a flock of sheep is an opposing army — that is literature’s true subject, according to the critic and journalist Elif Batuman. Novels are about other novels — and how they make us suffer, she wrote in her 2010 essay collection, “The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them.” They are about “the protagonist’s struggle to transform his arbitrary, fragmented, given experience into a narrative as meaningful as his favorite books.”

Despentes’s understanding of rape shapes the feminism in her work. Her books aren’t much concerned with the material conditions of women’s lives — there’s only glancing acknowledgment in “King Kong Theory”: “Why didn’t anyone invent the equivalent of Ikea for child care or Mac for housework?” Her true subject is women’s physical vulnerability, the way the threat of rape is central in how the sexes are oriented toward each other and how women collude with men in shrinking themselves, bargaining away their power in order to be desired. She has punk politics — a sustained commitment to rage, which she believes is leached out of women too early and too easily. They’re schooled in docility (a favorite word of hers): “Hiding our feelings . . . and not listening to yourself. Not listening to what is wrong for you and smiling when you’re just destroyed inside.”